Most advertisers don’t spend enough time optimising their accounts, and that often leads to poor ad performance. Wordstream found that half of small businesses don’t even log in to their AdWords account once a month. Here are tips for a better-performing Pay Per Click (PPC) account.
Delete display campaigns that don’t work
Sort through the Display Keywords tab in AdWords by status. Set the date range to year to date. Do you see a lot of keywords that haven’t really accomplished anything in the last year? Take a deeper dive into them. Really investigate if there is any reason to keep them around. Did they work at some time and you want to try them out again? Are they seasonal keywords in an ecommerce account? If you have a good reason for keeping them around then leave them alone for now. If not, delete them.
Landing page optimisation
After making all of your keyword and ad copy changes, make sure all of your landing pages are still relevant and will maintain a good Quality Score. You could also test different landing pages for ads as one of your new spring-cleaning ad copy tests.
Remove duplicate keywords
It’s nearly impossible to maintain a PPC account that is free of duplicate keywords, particularly if you have multiple managers working in one account, or are frequently adjusting match types and account settings. However, it is imperative to your business (and your bank account) to check for duplicates in the account on a monthly or quarterly basis. Duplicates are keywords with the same match types that are within the same ad group, campaign, or differing campaigns, across your account.
Identify expensive keywords
Costly keywords are not always those that have higher cost-per-clicks; they can also be the keywords that aren’t yielding any return on ad spend, or offer very poor returns. At the first sign of something costing too much or not providing a return, your first reaction may be to pause, but take a deeper look. Taking the time to investigate could allow you to make some tweaks and turn that costly keyword into a money-making keyword.
Keep an eye on conversion tracking
Another aspect of your account you should evaluate during your spring cleaning is the effectiveness of your conversion tracking. Over time, changes to ad copy can lead to varying click-through rates and conversions, so it pays to monitor how well (or not) your previous strategies are performing now. If a cluster of keywords that used to perform strongly is no longer yielding any real returns in terms of conversions, get rid of them.
This article was originally published on: www.wordstream.com.
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